Hi friends,
This week: Quantum healthtech, Bayer blues, and The Kooks.
News Bites 🥪
🗣️ Depression speech app can diagnose condition in 60 seconds - Continuity of care and a human clinician does the same thing. But could this enable it at scale?
📃 11 things I'd like to see national bodies tackle to make UK healthtech more viable - 11 very sensible suggestions, from this week’s eminently sensible Pigeon Pod guest, Liam Cahill.
🩹 ‘Smart bandage’ with biosensors could help chronic wounds heal - Smart Bandage sound like an indie band you might have seen supporting The Kooks at Camden Roundhouse in about 2004.*
🤬 Bayer plans to scale back women’s health R&D - Bayer is shifting the focus of its drug research away from women’s health and towards neurology, rare diseases, and immunology.
🔋 Life sciences companies supercharged with £277 million in investment - I thought we’d all agreed to stop using ‘supercharged’ in about 2014? There was a whole meeting about it. I may have imagined this.
🖲️ Cleveland clinic and IBM launch world's first quantum computer dedicated to healthcare research and biomedical discoveries - So, ChatGPT on steroids? Pigeon would try to make a quantum computing joke, but doesn’t want to constantly look like a Planck.
📲 Babylon Health virtual GP app faces cash crunch (£) - Eesh. Babylon has close to 1,000 UK employees. With the tech sector the way it is, Pigeon hopes this situation improves. One of the big dogs struggling doesn’t bode well for healthtech investment.
What to listen to 🔊
🐦 A 60 second diagnosis? - Join James, Jessica and digital health doyen Liam Cahill as they do their best to debug the code of this week’s healthtech stories.
🔊 #297 Is technology dehumanising healthcare? With founder and CEO Dr Alison Darcy - travel back in time to our chat with Dr Alison Darcy, founder and CEO of Woebot Health, a friendly chatbot that helps with everyday stress, depression, and anxiety.
Events 📅
⚾️ Pitch @ Summit - Pigeon’s favourite things to pitch: innovative healthtech solutions, a tent, a baseball. Only one of these applies here, and given you’re not reading Camping Pigeon or MLB Pigeon, you can probably work out which.
🔐 Decoding the Future of Women - A meeting place for brilliant minds to learn, get inspired and co-create, slap bang in the middle of London Tech Week.
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🧫 Senior Data Scientist, Entia - Fancy creating medtech that helps cancer patients? Entia** details online and you could entia own data dream job.
🛸 Director of Enterprise, UCLPartners - As is tradition, didn’t read this one, so assume it’s a role leading the Starship Enterprise, the first Earth built starship capable of reaching Warp 5***. Lot of responsibility that.
🧠 React Frontend/API Developer, MYNDUP - So hard to write about MYNDUP without getting Bucks Fizz’s 1981 banger Making Your Mind Up stuck in your head. Listen to that then try to have a bad day. I dare you. It’s made of sunshine and joy. And mullets.
⛵️ Fellow in Digital Health and Entrepreneurship, HEE - Etymology lesson anyone? ‘Fellowship’ in Middle English literally meant fellows on a ship, to create a sense of a group of folk working towards one aim. It was also slang for sexual intercourse. No idea why. If you find a medieval person, ask them.
*Pigeon often wonders what these bands do now. Still going? Working an office job? Shift supervisor at Dixons? We’ll never know. [You know Dixons went bust in 2012, right? - Ed.]
**These puns rely on Entia being pronounced “enter ya”, which I’m not entirely sure it is.
***This is a Star Trek joke. If you didn’t get it, congratulations you’re cooler than I am. If you did: 🖖